I must admit that I did enjoy the satellite radio and the novelty of driving something different, but for someone that drives as much as I do, my car becomes an extension of myself. It has a comfortable fit. My foot knows exactly how to accelerate smoothly. The placement of everything is so familiar, I don’t have to think about where any of my stuff is.

I can also drive in the car pool lane by myself.

I missed that the most this week – this long week. I’m very happy to finally be back in my own saddle again.

As it turned out, my car did, indeed, have an actual malfunction. It wasn’t an extraterrestrial influence, just an inverter pump. The part was back ordered, and I ended up with a Dodge Carabiner until this evening. The Prius is all better now.

I’m hoping that my buddies are all better now, too – not the ones from the alien run, but the ones from the hike last weekend. We encountered some angry bees that cut our commune with nature short.

First of all I want to thank all of you who read my blog! I’ve been posting my geocaching adventures each Thursday for two years now, and have watched my subscription numbers gradually get bigger. Writing about my experiences makes it even more fun to go out and find caches. I really appreciate all of the comments, too – please keep ’em coming, and feel free to make suggestions.

I wrapped up my year of geocaching with two runs in the Pasadena area. On Christmas day, I headed out with OLdweeb, tozainamboku, and BenH57 for 40 urbans and a gourmet Chinese dinner. OLdweeb covers it very nicely in his blog, and got much better pictures than I did that day. Do click the link and check out his post!

A couple of days ago, I headed back out to the same area to do a hike through the adjacent arroyo with f0t0m0m and the Ventura Kids.

A splash of color:

An archery range:

Um, NO, Steve, the cache is NOT in there!! Fail!

By the way, I got a heads up that our record of 413 caches in 24 hours has already been broken – in Denmark and Sweden no less! Here’s the comment posted on my blog about it –

Author : Team Mojito
Comment:
Yesterday (28. december 2009) the danish geocachers Picht and Elmbaek found a record breaking 480 caches in 20 hours. 251 in Denmark and the rest in Sweden. 2 hours transport between the found places included in the 20 hours.

These are the same guys, Team DK08, that set the record in Sacramento a couple of years ago, back when that was a mere 315! I’ve asked them to write a little about their crazy day, and will post that when I get it!
Meanwhile, you can check out the two power trails they did. This is one of the caches in Denmark – PT#250 – Nordsjællands powertrail and this is one of them in Sweden – Halmstad PowerTrail “HPT B75”

Of course the city of Pasadena is all about New Year’s Day and the parade. It takes a couple of weeks for all the setting up:

This is the famous corner of Orange Grove and Colorado Boulevards that all floats and bands must negotiate:

This is normally a lovely tree-lined, wide-lawned scenic thoroughfare, now transformed into a jungle of chain link and bleachers:

I’ve been to the parade in person a few times, but this year I’ll enjoy it from the comfort of my living room as most Americans do… then I’ll head out for a short hike to start the year off in the wonderful local scenery. I took this photo in the hills on the north end of the San Fernando Valley this week as I hiked up to A Day At The Speedyway
:

I don’t know how many of you will have an opportunity to do a Wherigo cache, since you must own a Garmin Oregon or Colorado GPSr to run the program. I don’t own either of them, and have no plans to, so when I saw the new Wherigo cache posted near me, I wondered how I would be able to get it cleared off the map. I decided to lay in wait to see who would find the cache, so I would know who owned the requisite equipment, and was soon rewarded with that knowledge. I quickly used my best geosponge techniques and asked the first finder, LaEd, if I could borrow his Oregon. He was very gracious in saying yes!

***Thanks so much, LaEd!***

Next I had to find and unsuspecting partner to go with me. I had intel (again, thanks to LaEd) that the adventure started at the bottom of a hill and ended at the top 2 or 3 miles away, and a car bridge was de rigeur. Good advice, as I’d hiked that trail once before to get the caches on it, we’d used a car bridge then to only go DOWN hill. The Wherigo author – naturally – designed his cache to be done UP hill. This is to be expected of a seasoned hiker like tozainamboku. *sigh*

I ended up with two cohorts that hot morning: f0t0m0m (Jim) and RCKen (Ken).
RCKen

Although the Wherigo programs and the equipment they need can be kinda buggy, there are a lot of fun possibilities here and a lot of room for creativity. The first one I did was in a park in Riverside with a Sherlock Holmes mystery feel. This one, my second, did not disappoint. Toz created a mini-odyssey around the not insignificant history of the Santa Susanna Pass. Although I knew a little bit about it, this time I was able to imagine myself out there in the late 19th century making an arduous journey from Chatsworth to Simi Valley in a covered wagon.

Today, it takes me 20 minutes in my air-conditioned fuel-efficient music-filled padded-seated Prius. Then, it would have taken seriously all day, in the heat or whatever weather there was, on a wooden bench inside and getting out to walk up the steeper part.

The trail we took starts at the southern end of Oakwood Cemetary and ends where the 118 freeway dips south over Rocky Peak, at the road called Lilac Lane. If you zoom in a couple times on the Mapquest map, you can identify those locations. Here’s part of the trail that the wagons negotiated. You can see the stair steps sort of cut in to the rock to give the horses and wagons some sort of traction:

There are holes drilled in to the solid rock of the trail along the way. To assist in getting up and down the hill, the drivers would anchor the wagons with ropes to poles placed in these holes:

This is The Devil’s Slide itself, looking down hill. Going down was more dangerous than going up. You can see that there’s not much to stop a wagon from slipping all the way down or off the side.

This tile mural is halfway up/down the slide:

OK, enough history! Back to Wherigo! As we hiked up the trail, a fictional journey unfolded along the way. To advance in the story and the game, you must be at the coordinates it gives you to get the information for the next destination. For more information: Wherigo.com

From the start screen we were lead to the Stage Stop where we boarded a stage coach. The driver looked remarkably like a local cacher, DonJ. He must have ancestors from here or something, but anyway… we had a piece of gold in our inventory, so we gave it to him for safekeeping. It seemed the sensible thing to do at the time.

Along about here
the stage coach made a pit stop. We were warned about rattlesnakes, but we picked up that tumbleweed we saw anyway. The snake it revealed just hissed at us when we talked to it. Of course we knew better than to “examine” the snake, but we did. Game over….. LOL! We restarted the recently saved game but were stuck with no new destinations or tasks. There’s supposed to be a hint screen about Dr. Doolittle needing to repeat himself to animals, but it never appeared. Thankfully, our trusty lifeline, LaEd, filled in that detail for us.

The snake was civil as long as we didn’t try to examine it, and it told us where we were to go next. About .2 miles up the trail, I learned that we needed to save the game more often than it suggested, as the Oregon has a propensity to shut itself down. ARG! I hiked back to the coordinates to talk to the snake again. On that backtrack is when the bandits struck! That little chicken stagecoach driver threw down our gold and the bandits got away! Alas, we had examined the stagecoach and its secret compartment too late. At least we didn’t really NEED the gold later. Maybe DonJ, I mean the stagecoach driver, was in cahoots with the bandits. Hm.

Next we got out of the stagecoach again to talk to a mountain lion. He didn’t let us pet him, but he had good information. Kitty… kitty….

Mountain lion in training:

At the bottom of the slide and about halfway between the cars, we were stuck again with no further tasks or destinations. After another lifeline, we simply continued up the hill to see if anything popped up. It did. I didn’t know that the Wherigo zones could be really large, but the “Devil’s Slide” zone in the game encompasses that whole section of trail. The rest of the journey involved a quiz, a trick about the answers (no need to back track on that, trust me), a medicine man with some curious herbs, and finally, the ammo can at the top! Ahh… and the cars were there, too…whew!

Oh, and yes, you CAN see Ooper’s Cache from up there… a local running joke… and also part of the Secret of Santa Susanna Pass…. Thanks to toz for the excellent and entertaining adventure, indeed!

I have a few more photos from that day to show you. There is a seasonal pond at the top, dry now, but must have been used to water the horses back then:

Looking up the hill from a side trail to the north of the slide, you can “connect the dots” of the gas company signs:

It’s really difficult to get a picture of a lizard, but I got one! NO, we did not see any real rattlesnakes or mountain lions (Mom…) – just this guy:

On the way back around to my car at the bottom, we stopped to get some ice cold drinks at the gas station on the corning of Topanga Canyon Blvd. and Chatsworth St., discovering the most amazing interior of a gas station ever!